Sunday Link Run

Time for new links:

• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages – wonderfully funny post by James Iry.
• The Huxley MMO-FPS-thingie is opening up for a beta: huxley.ijji.com. The concept looks interesting, but the devil’s in the details for that kind of game. I’ll be keeping my eyes on that one.
• BF1943 Pacific published a new video of Iwo Jima this week. Check it out — I can sneak out the info that the game is a lot of fun, telling from the playtests we’ve had.
• And more videos: The “Meet the Spy” TF2 Video is just out.
• If you haven’t seen David Perry’s TED talk on Video Games, check it out.
• And of course, the “dumbass of the week” award goes to Sony CEO Michael Lyton, who told the world “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet“. I was trying to think of a witty reply, but it’s so stupid my mind explodes just from trying.

Sunday Link Run

Time for a new blog feature… I’ll post some interesting links that I’ve come by during the week.

• Microsoft presents a new programming language, Axum, built with a focus on paralell programming and message passing between agents. Looks interesting.
• Andrei Alexandrescu’s slides from boostcon are online: Iterators must go.
• The news of the week in the games world: 3d realms is shutting down. Duke Nukem Forever looks to be forever a dream. Also shows you why deadlines are good.
• DICE is hiring a front-end and back-end web developer for a new product, causing a bit of a stir. If you’re a web developer wanting to play in the games industry, go for it!
• The EA3 press event happened during the week. EA Forum members are putting their full creativity into getting a better look at BF: Bad Company 2.
• And while some of these actually do make sense, 13 things that don’t make sense is an interesting read.

A Spectacular Failure

Back in the day I worked with the startup independent developer Limebird Entertainment, we entered into a few game development competitions. You know the kind — make a game, show it off together with lots of others and then a group of people select the best ones for some prize.

Usually, the competitions themselves were not that exciting, but you know you take what you can get in terms of exposure and if you’re making a game anyway, then why not enter it into the competition? So we did.

The immediate result of this is that we now had a deadline. Deadlines can be incredibly healthy things because they force you to pull together and produce something solid. It doesn’t matter how many subsystems you have in place or how brilliant they are unless you’ve got something you can actually show off to impress people.

Another thing about deadlines is that you’re always behind for them. We were no exception here… I’ve done some crazy crunching at my current job, but for a single crunch, the one we did on Velox for that competition must be the absolute worst kind of crazy. The setup of the competition that year was that you bring your machine in (unless you liked the ones they had), and you show off the game on a big projector screen.

We worked incredibly long hours the week leading up to that deadline. The game was coming together really well, but we were working ourselves dead. We didn’t really have all the stuff in that we wanted, however, and the deadline loomed. We worked all through the night to the presentation day, and then finally packed up our demo machine and left for the presentation.

At this time, I’d been awake and at work on this thing for about 30 hours. I was dead tired, and I’m sure my colleague wasn’t much better off. I was running on fumes and Coca-Cola.

Anyway, we set up the game, show off our menu system, host and join a network game and fly around for a bit in the hovercraft. Really high-tech stuff for the kind of level the competition was at, but it was also pretty rough around the edges. A minimap bug led to us having a hard time finding each others, for instance. Also, not having prepared any presentation as such, we sort of played around for a bit and showed off most of what we had in a rather unordered manner.

Then I went home, slept for 4 hours or so, got up, fixed most of our major bugs, and slept for another 10 hours.

The competition? We lost it to a team who’s game was an un-innovative re-make of an old game and whos engine was basically a Maya file viewer that needed really top-end hardware to even run properly, despite the really simple stuff they were doing.

So just what happened there?

The first thing to take away from this story is hidden in what happened after the demo. I slept for just a few hours, and was so conditioned to working with the game that I went back to it, even though we didn’t have a deadline anymore. But something had changed — I wasn’t dead tired anymore, so my mental clarity was much much better, which meant I could do much more good.

If you ever think about doing an all-nighter to hit a deadline, think again. If you’re crunching hard for long periods of time, stop to think, because chances are you’ve crunched so long that you now produce less in 12 hours than you normally would in 8.

The second question is the key to why we lost the competition: Polish and show. We failed to analyse the situation of what our target was, so instead of locking down early and polishing what we had, we forged on adding stuff to our game. If we’d come to our demo in a better shape with a presentation we’d practiced for beforehand and a polished game, we might have done a lot better. Now our high-tech stuff just looked bland next to the shiny effects of the winner-to-be (as did many other teams’ high-tech stuff, by the way).

Whenever you’re up against a deadline and need to show off what you’re working on, take a few minutes to identify what could give you the maximum impact with the people who’ll be watching and judging your stuff. Focus on the right things.

And have a good night’s sleep before you go there.

The Economics of Making Your Customers Hate You

The spectacular trial and marketing disaster against the Pirate Bay continued today, with the verdict of the first court (no doubt this will be appealed a few times around).

The three guys from the pirate bay, and their internet co-location and bandwidth provider were sentenced to one year in prison and a total of 30 million SEK of damages today. Whatever you think about the pirate bay, the sentencing of their internet provider is nothing short of incompetency from the Swedish court.

But let’s put that aside for a moment.

Let’s just look at the costs and benefits. These guys now have to pay 30M SEK for their sins of building a search engine. Let’s put that into perspective, shall we? 30M SEK is (with today’s exchange rate) €2,680,246. Contrast this with the spendings of the industry: 75M Pounds is what the record industry spends each year hunting pirates, apparently (only the record industry… who knows what the international movie associations’ and games associations’ and writers’ associations are spending…). With today’s exchange rate, that’s €81,466,099.

That means it’d require 30 such spectacularly unpopular court cases against major file sharing sites won just to win back the costs spent on hunting pirates. Really, who is it that thinks this is a good idea?

In other news, if you’re going to pirate a game, please do it off the ‘net and where it wont hurt the companies that tries to support it for the people who buy games. If you pirate a game and then try to get support for it, you’re a real asshole.

The Classics

I spent last weekend at a LAN party. Some of my friends regularly arrange small LAN parties with 10-15 people, and this one was a good one with maybe 12 people who stayed there most of the weekend. Over the years, we’ve accumulated a bunch of games we always play, to the point where we play mostly the same (old) games every time. It’s a bit weird, really, and I’ve given it some thought.

I think one of the reasons is that there simply aren’t as many great LAN games being made any more. Most multi-player games tend to be aligned for Internet play, and as a result don’t work all that well locally. We played some Left 4 Dead this time, which is an awesome game for LAN as well as online (if you don’t have it — seriously, get it), but with the cap of 4 people for a campaign game that was sort of limited to the times where we had only a few people around, with most people choosing to go to bed or off to find a snack or whatever.

Another of the reasons I think causes this is, strangely, we buy more games. This seems counter-intuitive, as buying more games should mean having more games to play, but seeing as most games don’t play well together with pirated versions that means we can’t play games not everyone has. The result is that in general only one game will be a smash hit enough to have coverage at one of our LAN parties (The Orange Box did it for Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead did this time around as I mentioned).

Some older games came with functionality that countered this — Total Annihilation could be installed as a Multi-player Spawn version, and when you started a game only a certain number of people needed to play the “full version” (with the CD in the drive) — one CD for every 3 players I believe. Really, more games should do this for LAN play.

There’s also a number of classic games that are just outdated but still best in their genre — even some games that are hardly known, and some forgotten with time. The first game that caused this was Carmageddon II. We played that game through countless nights of hysterical laughter for a huge number of LAN parties, until at one point the game’s outdated code simply wouldn’t work with newer computers and operating systems (not a huge surprise, as it was IPX-based for multi-player). We’ve mourned the game since, to the point of trying to set up a dedicated network with dedicated computers only to play that game (which failed).

Another game that stuck around was Rune, which chances are you’ve never heard about. When I first played it at a LAN party it was already an aging game, and then later I managed to dig up a single online store that still sold it and the multiplayer version, Halls of Valhalla. We bought a stack of copies of both games, and we’re still playing it every party. No other melee fighting game has come close to the same kind of frenetic fighting feeling.

Operation Flashpoint has also stayed with us, regardless of the “sequel” Armed Assault which didn’t really add much to the game, but had significantly higher requirements. Flashpoint is the one and only game we play as a sort of large-scale co-op experience. The game engine is slow and looks sort of bad but the game play is unmatched anywhere else. The built-in map editor (despite all its quirks) has kept the game going. Far-out mods like LEGO models also help provide endless amounts of wicked fun.

One more game is actually the indie game Soldat. It’s a highly addictive, frenetic 2D side scrolling infantry combat game controlled simply with the mouse and WASD to move around.

I could go on for a long time. Total Annihilation held for so long I thought we’d never stop playing it, but eventually we did. Some of the Age of Empires games really rocked (we actually played AoE II this time as well). Flatout and then Flatout 2 are some of the nicest aggressive driving games out there (pale, in comparison to Carmageddon II, but still). We played  the Trackmania games for a long long long time, though now I seem to be the only one who still loves it. We played Battlefield 1942, Desert combat, Galactic Conquest, BF: Vietnam, Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2142 for a number of LAN parties.

The new stuff this time around came mainly from mods. I found this wonderfully wicked steam mod called D.I.P.R.I.P. Warm Up which is another version of the whole “Car with guns” theme, extremely well implemented with the wonderfully entertaining Uranium Run and Destruction (bombing) game modes. It seems to lack a following currently — it was a blast to play, but the most I ever saw was two servers up.

Of course, Battlefield Heroes is coming along nicely, but without the ability to easily play with friends it isn’t ready for a LAN party… yet. Still, it’s a great game for all those little periods of time where there was nothing in specific going on, and I think some of the guys got seriously hooked.

I wish some of those games were still available for people to try them out. Regardless of the lack of fancy graphics, some games are still the best games around. Also, suggestions for more games and mods to try appreciated!